The South African
In commemoration of the centenary of the First World War (1914-1918) and its effect on world history, we bring you some of the 'voices' of ordinary South Africans who recorded their experience of the war in verse. The poems are selected specifically because of their South African charm, and were part of a talk presented at the Johannesburg branch of the South African Military History Society in 2018.
LAST VOYAGE
HFS 1917
Out of the winding harbour,
Beyond the thrusting hail,
Of countryman and fellow
With a laughing cheer we sai!.
We are quit of all care and sorrow,
And rid of the day that has been;
Over the world's horizon
The deep wave leaps between.
With stars and sprays in our rigging
With darkness before and behind,
We are tuned to the realm of midnight,
And a port out of time and mind.
Out of an earthly time and sunset,
Into no earthly morn,
The past is unbound from its morrow,
Our laughing souls are borne .
........................................................................................................................
THE GLORY OF GERMAN EAST
E.W.
What of the glory of German East
What of the carnival and carouse,
What of the song and the civic feast,
What of the bays for the victor's brows?
'0 the travails of German East -
Blistering suns and pelting rain;
Merciless thorn and the prowling beast,
Where the warrior waged his grim campaign!
0, the crosses in German East -
Set in the derelict bush or swamp;
Only the firefly, like the mystic priest,
Flits through the gloom with his eerie lamp!
"Never procession from German East!
Mute are the cymbals and fifes and drums!
Lo, how they strove in those battle slums!"
........................................................................................................................
CHANGE OF TRUMPS
Chaplain Arthur Cripps 1916
Black corpse is missing (from others' poetry) as it is also
Absent from the 'whitened' rolls of honour
Remember to count the sparrow's fall
Our roll, no papers print, or porters dead.
........................................................................................................................
THE SAI
T C Ridsdale 2SAI
We are no use for lorries and we never rides or flies
But plods along the ditches for the sake of exercise,
And when we ain't a'slippin in a shell-hole or a trench,
They finds us little jobs, of course, to keep us in the stench,
Cause why? I'll tell you; we're the slogging SA !
We pushes RE trollies, and we salvage heaps of duds,
We does a bit of digging, and plants savoys and spuds,
We load the trucks and wagons and entrains the transport mules,
And we 'scrounge' round for timber (which is quite against the rules)
Oh my! We're handy in the blinking SA !
We outs on rest and spends our days practising for a 'stunt',
Then starts at night a-planting stakes on someone else's front,
And when we've cleaned our rifles, and got nothing else to do
We trim and weed the garden at Divisional HQ
They're fly - At clicking - the poor old SA !
They bungs us down in billets that's become a total wreck
And when got 'em 'cushy', sends us off again on trek,
But, sure we never grumble, be the job however strange,
'Cause if we don't get 'beaucoup' rest, we get a heap of change.
You try! You'll get it - in the Grand Old SA !
.....................................................................................................................
BLACK ARMY
S E K Mqhayi
Go catch the German Kaiser, bring him home,
And cut this war short in a jiffy;
Let the Kaiser come and talk with us,
We'll tell him how the Zulus won at Sandlwana,
Of Thaba Ntsu where the Boers were baffled,
The gathering of wizards at Gwadana.
........................................................................................................................
THE BANDAGE
'Mome'
'Flowers, give me flowers,
Now I'm laid in bed .... '
So the sister brought them,
Stacked within her arms,
Crimson, white and violet,
Full of perfumed charms.
Very sweet was sister
And her voice was kind,
But - she left the bandage
For his eyes were blind.
........................................................................................................................
DELVILLE WOOD
W A Beattie, 4th SAI
The living stream of khaki flowed,
Through land laid waste and seared
And torn by ruthless giant guns
And thus they entered Bernafay
Through fire and fetid fume,
While every tree a-trembling stood,
As if it sensed its doom;
And in that avenue of woe they
Paused to count their dead,
Then grimly on to Delville.
........................................................................................................................
Acknowledgement
With thanks to the work of Dr Gerhard Genis, whose thesis on the South African Great War Poetry alerted the compiler to many poems of which she would otherwise have been ignorant.
Return to Journal Index OR Society's Home page
South African Military History Society / scribe@samilitaryhistory.org